Farewell to Scottish & Newcastle …

Usually the passing of a major UK company into foreign ownership — and with it the ending of British pretensions to global leadership in another industry — is the cue for national soul-searching and recrimination. Not so the demise of Scottish & Newcastle, which finally agreed last month to be carved up by Denmark’s Carlsberg and its Dutch rival Heineken. Except perhaps in its native Edinburgh, the brewer of Fosters and John Smith’s bitter is likely to go unlamented — either by its shareholders or customers.

Nobody who remembers the shabby state of British pubs until just a few years ago — the grotty furniture, the limited choice of mass-produced beers, the appalling food and stinking urinals — will shed tears for the last of Britain’s big brewers. For decades, the beerage, as the brewing elite were known, were a cosseted bunch of arrogant monopolists — until their comeuppance arrived in 1989 in the form of the Thatcher government’s ‘Beer Orders’.